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Dessert

Snow Drift

A chilled dessert made with milk, sugar, lemon, egg whites, and isinglass, served with a custard of yolks and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Snow Drift

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Soak the isinglass in 1 quart of water for 2 hours or overnight, weighted down.

  2. Pour 1 pint of boiling water over the soaked isinglass, then add the sugar and lemon juice.

  3. Chill the mixture on ice until it begins to thicken.

Whip and set

  1. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks and fold them into the mixture.

  2. Pour the mixture into a vessel rinsed with cold water and place it on ice.

Serve

  1. Serve with a custard made from the 4 yolks, 1 egg, and the milk.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Isinglass
Sets the mixture as it chills, giving it a light, firm body.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they trap air and make the dessert light and airy.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and brightness that cut through the sweetness.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, adding moisture and creaminess.

The step that matters

Fold the whipped egg whites in gently. Stiff egg white foam holds air that gives the dessert its lightness. Stirring or folding too hard deflates the foam, so the mixture turns dense instead of airy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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